I ended up reformatting (after making a fresh backup) and starting over. I couldn't find a way to get around the metadata space limitation. I believe thought that I future proofed my installation so that it wouldn't happen again. I set aside 8M for the metadata when I used the pvcreate command.

I tried moving every third extend with an offset of 1 to the second physical volume, and every third extend with and offset of 2 to the third physical volume, but I ran out of metadata space about 45% through the move.

I've setup a file based metadata directory, and I'm going to try to complete the move again.

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 01:14:26PM -0500, Doug Eubanks wrote:
> Would it be possible to extend the linear lv onto a striped lv area, move
> the data to the new extents and then remove the old lv area using lvreduce
> perhaps?

Oh, that. Yes, perfectly. Add the new PVs to the VG using vgextend, then
create whatever LV layout you need on the new PVs (lvcreate ... -i ... PV),
mkfs, then copy the data to the new filesystems, rearrange mountpoints,
then vgreduce the old PV from the VG. Done. But not on-line... you can
move LVs to another PV within a VG, but you can't convert a normal LV to a
striped one.
--
Die, v.:
To stop sinning suddenly.
-- Elbert Hubbard